This is a fork of Polo File Manager, originally created by Tony George. The original project is now archived, and this fork aims to keep it alive — though it is expected to diverge significantly from the original over time, following the maintainer's plans.

It is maintained by Stefano Balzarotti (Orbintsoft), with Claude as an AI support tool under human review. The project stays free software under GPL-3.0-or-later; author and contributor credits are kept in AUTHORS.

Contributions are welcome and will be credited. The long-term hope is to hand the project back to the community, should someone one day wish to maintain it.

Polo File Manager

Polo is a modern, light-weight file manager for Linux with support for multiple panes and tabs; support for archives, and much more.

Features

• Multiple Panes - Single-pane, dual-pane (vertical or horizontal split) and quad-pane layouts. Supports multiple tabs in each pane. Each tab has an embedded terminal which can be toggled with the F4 key.
• Multiple Views - List view, Icon view, Tiled view and Media view.
• Device Manager - Devices popup displays list of connected devices with options to mount and unmount. Supports locking/unlocking LUKS encrypted devices.
• Archive Support - Support for browsing archives as normal folders. Supports creation of archives in multiple formats with advanced compression settings.
• PDF Actions - Actions in right-click menu: Split and Merge pages, Add or Remove Password, Rotate, etc.
• ISO Actions - Actions in right-click menu: Mount, Boot in VM, Write to USB
• Image Actions - Actions in right-click menu: Rotate, Resize, Reduce Quality, Optimize PNG, Convert to other formats, Boot or Reduce Colors, etc.
• Checksum & Hashing - Actions in right-click menu to generate MD5, SHA1, SHA2-256 ad SHA2-512 checksums for file and folders. Double-click on files with .md5, .sha1, .sha2, .sha256, .sha512 extensions to verify.
• Video Downloads - Paste URLs from YouTube and other video websites in a folder to download video files. Integrates with youtube-dl utility.

Screenshots

Single-pane layout with Sidebar and IconView

Single-pane layout with Sidebar and ListView

Dual-pane layout with IconView

Dual-pane layout with ListView

Options for creating archives - Supports all encoder options, encryption, and split archives

Support for browsing cloud storage accounts

Installation

PPA and DEB files are available for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions. Binary installers are available for all Linux distributions.

Installation

License

Polo is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).

The project was originally created by Tony George (teejeetech@gmail.com) and distributed under GPL-2.0-or-later. As permitted by the "or later" clause of that license, this fork is now distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later. The original copyright notices are retained in every source file, and all credit for the original work belongs to Tony George and the Polo community of contributors.